Bypassing all the arguments for and against this plan, I notice an interesting detail in the article. It applies to employers and employees (form W2) only. It apparently does not apply to business owners or freelancers (form 1099). So all the independent people (lawnkeepers, housekeepers, pool cleaners, handymen, freelancing programmers, etc) won't be affected by this either way, at least at first. They'd have to expand it to apply to everyone asking for any kind of service (hospitals, unemployment, banks, groceries) to have it affect 100% of the population. So if you want to avoid this card as long as possible, just start your own service business, or convince your employer to convert you to a form 1099 contractor, instead of a form W2 employee. You'll have to work out the pay scale to afford your vacations, insurance, and other perks, but that's workable. Also, if a lot of people become their own bosses, they technically always will have a job (their own business), so the unemployment lines would diminish. Theoretically. ;-)

Agreed on all counts, and don't forget adding honeypot MX records, as many bots will either target the highest-numbered MX, or only the lowest-numbered MX. Proper MTAs will follow RFC, and get around the honeypots, to the "real" MX hosts.

SPF, SenderID, and DKIM are not spam-fighting techniques. They are forgery-fighting techniques. Some spammers use SPF and SenderID records to give their spam a higher sense of legitimacy. A spammer cannot forge "paypal.com" because Paypal publishes SPF records. A spammer CAN pretend to be Paypal by using a look-alike domain with its own set of SPF records (ie: paypall.com, paypal.org). SPF and SenderID simply publish what IPs are authorized to send email claiming to be from a particular domain. DKIM does essentially the same thing, but is arguably better since it uses a cryptographic mechanism to assure the message in question was not appreciably altered in transit.

I'm not an expert, but from what I read of the XML files, launchd seems more of a wrapper program than a replacement for cron. Translated: ProgramArguments = /usr/sbin/cron; QueueDirectories = /var/cron/tabs; ps -wwax|grep cron # shows two cron processes in memory; So launchd takes the place of init, and starts up cron, with the proper arguments. Cron then takes care of its own.